Poor planning!

[…]“The second warning horn sounded in my head, and I took out the “whizwheel” and carefully calculated our fuel burn rate. We had enough fuel to hold for fifteen minutes!At the end of the fifteen minutes, the RCR was only up to “6” and we had to go somewhere else. The only suitable “somewhere else” was back home to Sawyer. So we amended our flight plan with Minneapolis Center and were informed that our return route, the entire western third of the upper peninsula was now “socked in with thunderstorms”. Those building cumulus clouds we has passed 30 minutes earlier had fired up along a 150-miles line and were moving at a snail’s pace to the east. Don’t I feel stupid now. We were now faced with a regulatory deviation no matter which way we turned, and we were running out of options faster than we were running out of jet fuel. Deteriorating fuel conditions, icy runway, thunderstorms, and two stupid pilots were all we had to work with. We swallowed our pride, declared a fuel emergency, and accepted the visual approach to the longest piece of concrete in Minneapolis. But the story does not end here. We were to be punished for our foolishness. After a perfect, on-speed landing and rollout, we slid off the edge of the taxiway while trying to taxi to the ramp, making any possibility of hiding our ineptitude an impossibility. In this situation, an actual low fuel divert through thunderstorms was clearly more risky than our eventual decision to land below RCR minimums. But what happened here? In effect, a failure to adequately plan and anticipate resulted in a self-induced emergency situation. Poor self-discipline early in the flight created a tight box we almost didn’t get out of”. (to be continued)